Mercurial and bullying to anyone in his path, President Donald Trump and a number of key people in his administration have had their turns in conflict with U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, parts of which are exposed in his memoir hitting bookshelves Tuesday.
Texts laden with profanity are shared, the bravado of Tillis is on full tilt, and some more insight to his decision in June 2025 to step away and not seek a third term are in the book, according to excepts released by the publisher. Inner party squabbles are nothing new, neither for Trump and Tillis’ Republicans or the Democrats they so feverishly try and defeat, and the book is another chapter of testimony.
“How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents: The Trouble with Sycophants, Courage Outsourcing, and Partisan Group Think,” is a 224-page read published by Broadside Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Preorders are already in the popular shopping spots: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, Bookshop, Target and Walmart.
Sycophant, says the Cambridge Dictionary, is “a person who gives insincere praise to powerful or wealthy people to gain an advantage.”
Tillis’ efforts to support the president have been numerous in his 12 years and collectively are overwhelming to his public disagreements. Those just happen to be hot button issues. Passion for the party gets questioned, most often not in conservative principles but routes to achievement.
For example, in one text from Tillis to Trump included in the book, Tillis writes, “I still want to help but I don’t take this b——- from anyone, including you Mr. President. Save that s— for the cowards who don’t care if you fail. I care if you fail and right now we are failing.”
In another, holding out on a reconciliation bill last summer before deciding to leave Washington, Tillis cited the projected cost of $32 billion via Medicaid that would fall to the state budget for rural hospitals and communities. He was one of two Republicans against the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, also known as House Resolution 1 and the Working Families Tax Cut. Trump jabbed on social media about a primary opponent.
In the book, a text from Tillis to Trump says, “If you had ever threatened me directly with a primary, I would have immediately told you to f— yourself, and I would have announced my retirement immediately.”
Tillis teetered last year on whether to confirm War Secretary Pete Hegseth before giving his approval. This year, he’s called on the president to fire him. Saturday marked Day 218 in the military action with Iran, artificial intelligence is rocketing through multiple industries including government both by implementation and oversight, all of which Tillis has been critical of Trump.
And when it comes to election integrity, the president and senator are each all in – including on the SAVE America Act, though Tillis got to a point this year saying implementation for 2026 wasn’t realistic while Trump was still pushing it.
Tillis, in an August interview about the book, explained he gave the term MAGATS – a play on the president’s slogan of making American great again – to individuals “not giving the president honest advice and putting us in positions that we could avoid.
“I’m talking about people who have never worked a day in business, who now have business strategy, decision-making roles, and they’re simply not looking around corners and taking care of this president. Those are the people I want to expose in this book.”
Trump, Hegseth, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem are among those named.
The book’s release comes four weeks before Election Day. In North Carolina, voting in a 61-day window started Sept. 4 with absentee ballots mailed out. Early voting in person is Oct. 15-31.
Tillis was elected to the town of Cornelius’ park board in 2002, town commissioners in 2003, and defeated incumbent John Rhodes in the 2006 Republican primary on the way to a seat in the North Carolina House of Representatives.
In 2010, with redistricting maps drawn and favoring Democrats, Republicans won both chambers of the General Assembly for the first time in 140 years – since Reconstruction and the Civil War. Tillis was elected speaker of the House and stayed in the role until beating Democratic U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan in 2014.
The 2010 midterms upheaval in the Legislature changed the directory of the state. The budget deficit then was between $800 million and $1.2 billion, and the turnaround reached an estimated $6 billion sending the state’s surplus to more than $5 billion prior to Hurricane Helene.
The pitch on the publisher’s website says, “Outspoken and uncensored, North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis pulls no punches about his time in Washington and how the sycophants surrounding President Trump, spineless Republican yes-men (and -women), and the weirdos of the MAGA world can’t get out of their own way.
“‘How to Lose Friends and Antagonize Presidents’ is a bare-knuckled, darkly funny wake-up call from Senator Thom Tillis, a true conservative who doesn’t mind a good scrap in a Congress that has lost its nerve. In this sharp, no-BS book, Tillis drags readers inside a Senate that too often behaves like a group of teenagers in a bad parody of a horror movie – heading straight toward the chainsaws instead of a nearby getaway car. Tillis takes us into a world of grifting sycophants and useful idiots in Trump 2.0, with the inner circle made up of ‘MAGATS’ (a term of his own devising).
“Fear, outsourced courage, and groupthink are hollowing out the party that Tillis spent much of his adult life building, and he’s not going to let it get dragged down without a fight. Drawing on his journey from trailer parks to the halls of power, Tillis offers a bracing tonic to stiffen spines, rebuild institutions, and keep the American experiment from going off the rails.”
